IET researcher and project officer blogs

I don’t engage very heavily with either Research Gate or with academia.edu for several reasons

(1) Time is limited, and there are only so many networks I can engage with

(2) All my work is available via my institutional repository (ORO) or via this blog

(3) Neither Research Gare nor academia.edu seems to be particularly open about its business model. How are they making money out of my time and my resources?

I thought for a while that ResearchGate might be making money via targeted job ads, but they’re currently suggesting I might be interested in the post of associate dean for veterinary research at Ross University, Saint Kitts and Neots. As my only qualifications for that job are that I once had a pet cat and I like visiting tropical beaches, I don’t think their targeting algorithms are very sophisticated.

Despite my overall lack of engagement, both sites now know a fair amount about me and my work, and my co-authors often upload papers. This means I sometimes get email updates on my downloads. This week, apparently, my work was downloaded 101 times, with 72 people downloading a technical report on social learning analytics and 16 downloading an editorial that came out this week. I even get a national breakdown of downloads (see pic). In addition to those shown, my work was accessed from Taiwan (3), Italy (3), Canada (2), Finland (2), South Korea (2), New Zealand (2), Indonesia (1), Romania (1) and Ecuador (1). That’s 20 countries this week.

Meanwhile, back at the institutional repository, my work has been downloaded over 1000 times this month. I’m not sure what to make of this. If these figures are typical (I’ve no idea if they’re high or low), then there is an enormous amount of scholars out there who are doing an enormous amount of reading. And it also looks as if the digital divide is growing – I see no African countries at all on that download list, and this reflects my experience at conferences.

It may seem a little quiet here at the Hub of late but rest assured we’re hard at work behind the scenes! Since the new year we’ve been particularly focused on writing up our research for journal publication. Simultaneously, the team is also involved in a number of other OER projects. Rob is working with HBZ on the OER World Map project; which is currently focused on building the technical architecture. Beck and Bea are developing the research strand of the Opening Educational Practices in Scotland (OEPS) project and Bea is also collaborating with the ExplOERer Project to design of an open course to train teachers in OER reuse. The course will be available on the Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) platform early next year.

First, a mention for #AXSchat – an online conversation that happens each Tuesday 20-21:00 UTC/GMT on Twitter – on all things accessibility and inclusion-related in business on the web and beyond. Run by @neilmilliken and @akwyz.

Greetings!

On the 24 February, I attended the e-Access'15 conference chaired by the excellent Dan Jellinek of Headstar and Nigel Lewis of AbilityNet. This is the ninth year that the conference on digital accessibility has been successfully run. As in previous years it was a one-day conference in central London.

Kevin Carey's talk on "The future of accessibility policy", read by Nigel Lewis in his absence, was as you'd expect, thought provoking and challenging. I'm still digesting it now… He provocatively argued that accessibility evangelism, advocacy, and software development over the past two decades had largely failed. He called for a complete re-think of our approach. His proposal centred around analytics,"task completion rates" and peer-normative comparisons.

Kevin's speech took me back to learning ergonomics (in the context of Applied Gerontology) back at Uni.. A simple ergonomics/ anthrometry example - as a 1.9m (6 foot 3 inches) person, with around a 34 inch inside leg, when I get on a bus or into an economy airline seat, I know I'll be cramped. This is because the space is designed to suit the vast majority of the population, for example the "95 percentile" (or 93, 94, 96... percentile) who fall below me in a standard distribution of heights or thigh-bone length measurements. This approach lets designers, and their clients, know who they will design for, and who will be discomfited or excluded (or endangered) by a design. It is an optimization technique that appears to date back to the ancient Greeks, predates anti-discrimination legislation, and when used appropriately is borne of good design, good business and pragmatism. That is, if they built buses and planes to sit tall people in comfort, then more people would stand in the rush-hour, and fewer of us could afford to fly.

Kevin's suggestions may indeed be the way to go, as long as we can collect sufficient data to help drive decisions. It may hang on people's willingness to self-declare their disabilities in online tools and services.

The paper begins by looking at why introducing learning analytics within an institution often proves to be difficult. It goes on to set out a framework that offers a step-by-step approach to the introduction of learning analytics, and shows how this can work in practice by focusing on developments in two very different institutions: a distance university in the UK and a university of technology in Australia.

The paper’s authors bring together a wealth of experience that is grounded in strategy, research and practice. Co-authors with a strategic perspective are Belinda Tynan, pro vice chancellor at the UK’s Open University who is leading on the development and roll-out of a programme of learning analytics across the institution, and Shirley Alexander, the deputy vice chancellor taking the lead on developing University of Technology Sydney as a data-intensive university. Leah Macfadyen from the University of British Columbia and Shane Dawson from the University of South Australia bring a research perspective that draws on an intensive study of the roll-out of analytics at an institutional scale, while Doug Clow from The Open University draws on his practitioner experience as a data wrangler, as well as his research experience in this area.

Abstract

A core goal for most learning analytic projects is to move from small-scale research towards broader institutional implementation, but this introduces a new set of challenges because institutions are stable systems, resistant to change. To avoid failure and maximize success, implementation of learning analytics at scale requires explicit and careful consideration of the entire TEL technology complex: the different groups of people involved, the educational beliefs and practices of those groups, the technologies they use and the specific environments within which they operate. It is crucial to provide not only the analytics and their associated tools, but also to begin with a clear strategic vision, to critically assess institutional culture, to identify potential barriers to adoption, to develop approaches to overcome these and to put in place appropriate forms of support, training and community building. In this paper, we provide tools and case studies that will support educational institutions in deploying learning analytics at scale with the goal of achieving specified learning and teaching objectives. The ROMA Framework offers a step-by-step approach to the institutional implementation of learning analytics and this approach is grounded by case studies of practice from the UK and Australia.

I'm happy to say that this morning we made a number of significant bug fixes live on the iSpot web site.

Here's a roundup of what's changed...

First up, we've added a "Please wait" spinner to the add/ edit observation wizard. This disables buttons on the form while slow operations like uploading photos occur. We hope this will reduce or eliminate the incidence of duplicate observations. This is a situation where we're eliminating a probable cause of the bug (duplicate observations), which may reveal further causes. In which case it will require further fixes. Time will tell.

Bear in mind that slowness in the add observation wizard can be caused by slow networks and low bandwidth. Something that is outside our control.

We've tested the spinner across a range of devices. In the Chrome browser on iOS (iPads, iPhones), the spinner will not appear, but the text "Please wait" will. A known issue. All other device/ browser combinations appear to work as expected.

Next, we fixed the peculiar "1970" date that was appearing if the first photograph used in the add observation wizard contained no EXIF data. (For those of you who are interested, you can read why the erroneous date was the 1st January 1970...)

There was another date-related bug, namely dates "disappearing" when you went back to edit an observation or project. This was a puzzler, however in the end the fix involved updating the third-party date module that iSpot employs. Job done!

Some strange text was appearing at the bottom of the add interaction wizard - on the location step. This turned out to be "debug" text (stuff added by developers to help them solve a problem). It took a little while to find where the text was being introduced. A fairly straightforward fix once we'd found the cause.

Hopefully, all this will help us make the most of Richard Greenwood's work on the add-observation wizard.

Finally, we've removed extraneous and commented-out HTML markup from Richard Lovelock's excellent Bootstrap-based theme. This shaves some kilobytes off each page request, and should provide a small performance boost, particularly on slow connections.

So, what do we have to look forward to?

Our performance guru, Greg, is still ironing out issues with the planned upgrade of the iSpot database to MySQL 5.7. This will provide us with a significant feature called "row-level locking" (in place of current table-level locks), which will significantly reduce a bottle-neck and improve performance. Our challenge is to maintain the geo-spatial database capabilities that iSpot requires, while making the most of feature improvements.

We've worked out the cause of the "missing" location title auto-complete options for our southern African cousins. The problem stems from significant differences between the global and ZA iSpot sites. There are data and even tables that aren't present in the legacy ZA site, because it only contained one community and species dictionary. We think we'll need significant down-time to fix this issue (a number of hours), so we're discussing how best to tackle this while minimizing disruption.

That's all for now. I hope that these fixes help you enjoy iSpot and reduce the frustrations.

Thank you for your patience. And for your enthusiasm - it's what makes the iSpot community tick!

Didn’t manage to make it to last year’s conference? Enjoy a particular session but wish you could hear it again? Never fear, you can now revisit our 2013 and 2014 conference with today’s release of eight recordings!

The four-week course explored the concept and practice of open research, ethics in the open, dissemination and the role of open reflection and evaluation. To read more about how the course was created, you can check out:

I’m excited to be able to tell you a bit more about what the research component of the OEPS project will be doing over the duration of the project and how we fit with the rest of the project. So, without further ado…

Who is responsible for the research?

Researchers based at the Institute of Educational Technology (IET), The Open University (UK) will be responsible for delivering the research components of the OEPS project. Led by Professor Martin Weller with researchers Dr Beck Pitt and Dr Bea de los Arcos, and expertise from across IET including our Learning and Teaching team (for example in relation to learning design or accessibility) we will work collaboratively with different stakeholder groups to ensure that the research and materials we deliver have real impact and build capacity across Scotland through our research.

One of the named topics is ‘Educator roles in open online courses‘ and the description is:

“What roles do educators play in massive open online courses (MOOCs)? How can they be most effective in supporting learners to achieve their learning goals? In these open online settings, teaching is carried out by a team of educators, including academic lead, course presenter, moderator, facilitator and the learners themselves. These roles are still being developed, and there is a pressing need to identify evidence-based good practice. The successful candidate will use data from a range of MOOCs to answer the questions above, and will have opportunities to work with the FutureLearn Academic Network, an international team of MOOC researchers.”

If you are interested in applying, you need to provide a short research proposal explaining how this area fits the overall theme of Open World Learning and how you intend to conduct research on the topic selected. See the website for more specific details about applying.

Last weekend, I was with the LACE project team at London’s Excel Centre for the BETT Show. For an enormous show with a substantial web presence, BETT is surprisingly cagey about defining itself or explaining what its name means. Fortunately, Wikipedia comes to the rescue: ‘BETT or The Bett Show (formerly known as the British Educational Training and Technology Show) is an annual Trade show in the United Kingdom that showcases the use of information technology in education.’

I was there not as a speaker but to engage in ‘event amplification’ – taking photos and tweeting about the event.

We followed these with the LACE Annual Meeting, with participants from across Europe getting together to discuss learning analytics over lunch in a nearby restaurant. The discussion was excellent, but I wouldn’t recommend the restaurant.

According to the latest set of Open Research Online (ORO) figures, I now have 15,391 total downloads. This makes me the 46th most downloaded researcher of the thousands on the OU system.

Checking back in my blog, my work had been downloaded 8,780 times last March. The change in the figures suggests my work is downloaded from ORO 80 times a day on average. This seems surprisingly high, and underlines the benefits of having research easily searchable and downloadable online.

Meanwhile, over on Google Scholar, all this downloading activity translates into 768 citations to date, or one citation for every 20 downloads. That rate has remained steady since March. I’m also surprised at that consistency – I would have expected the rate to vary because the download numbers are so very different.

I’m pleased to see that my thesis has now been downloaded 912 times. Open access makes it so much more easy to open doctoral research up to the world instead of leaving it languishing on the shelves of the author’s family.

Back in 2011, I was part of a group of practitioners and researchers that published a proposal for an open and modularised platform for open learning analytics. In it, we outlined the development of an integrated and extensible toolset that would help academics and organisations to evaluate learner activity, determine needed interventions, and improve advancement of learning opportunities.

We moved forward on this idea in spring this year when, following the LAK14 conference, I was invited to spend a weekend on the outskirts of Indianapolis, at the Open Learning Analytics (OLA) summit. One outcome of that event was the identification of domains in which future work may be conducted: open research, institutional strategy and policy issues, and learning sciences/learning design and open standards/open-source software – and ethical issues related to all of these.

At the start of December, there was another meet-up, this time in Europe and organised by the LACE project, together with the Apereo Foundation and the University of Amsterdam. In a room littered with classical sculpture, at Amsterdam’s Allard Pierson Museum, participants from across Europe gave presentations on their interests in, and vision for, Open Learning Analytics and its application to education or training.

Niall Sclater, from JISC in the UK, talked about developing the infrastructure for basic learning analytics systems.

Thieme Hemmis, from DelftX, talked about an open research framework – a standard instrument for collaborative research that can give access to data, people and instruments.

Erwin Bomas, from Kennisnet and the LACE project is working on a system to gain informed consent for access to data

Wolfgang Müller, University of Education Weingarten, is focusing on providing analytics to teachers to they can provide better formative feedback. The aim is to provide informative data on learning processes.

Patrick Lynch, University of Hull, introduced Apereo’s work on connecting up data, analytics and data presentation.

Vladimer Kobayashi is researching ways of linking the skills of graduates with the labour market.

Adam Cooper is leading a strand of the LACE project that is focused on interoperability and data sharing.

Neils Smits, VU university Amsterdam, usesg cluster analysis to understand student activity on the Blackboard virtual learning environment. This analysis accounts for 50% of variance in later exam performance.

Alan Berg, of the Apereo Foundation, talked about the grand challenge of learning analytics.

Following these presentations, we brainstormed ideas for action, exploring objectives for collaborative projects that could be achievable in 2-4 years, the methods to achieve these objectives, and the nature of an Open Learning Analytics Framework as a means of coordinating action. A next step will be to work together on bids to Europe’s Horizon 2020 funding programme in order to make these ideas into reality.

Team Hub wishes all its supporters, collaborators and friends all the very best for the forthcoming festivities and 2015! It’s been an amazing year and thank you for your continued support; we couldn’t do it without you all.

We’ve had a busy November and December (as ultra observant readers of our blog may have noticed, there was no monthly review for last month!)… so, where has the team been and what have we been up to?

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